China Retail March 2017

China: Growth in retail sales accelerates in March

April 17, 2017

In March, nominal retail sales in China grew 10.9% year-on-year, which was above both the 9.5% increase in the January-February period and the 9.7% increase that market analysts had expected. January-February’s print had represented the weakest growth in over a decade. The acceleration came on the back of a rebound in automobile sales and stronger sales for household appliances.

Compared to the previous month, retail sales expanded a seasonally-adjusted 0.84% in March (February: +0.96% month-on-month). Annual average growth in retail sales was stable at February’s 10.3% in March, thereby remaining at the lowest rate since April 2004.

The government set a retail sales growth target of 10.0% for this year. FocusEconomics Consensus Forecast participants expect retail sales to increase 10.2% in 2017, which is down 0.2 percentage points from last month’s estimate. In 2018, the panel foresees retail sales expanding 10.1%.

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Note: Month-on-month changes of seasonally adjusted nominal retail sales index and year-on-year variation in %. Owing to seasonal factors related to the Lunar New Year, annual figures for January and February are reported together.Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS) and FocusEconomics calculations.

Exports expanded 11.1% annually in January, coming in slightly above both December’s 10.9% increase and the 10.7% rise that market analysts had expected.
Meanwhile, imports surged to a 36.9% expansion over the same month last year in January, which overshot December’s 4.5% expansion.

The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI), published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP), fell slightly to 51.3 points in January from 51.6 points in December.

House prices in 70 large- and medium-sized cities rose 0.4% in December from the previous month, according to a weighted average index calculated by Thomson Reuters from data issued by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).